I've thought of this a lot before, too. I think it's a brilliant idea.

There are very significant negatives, of course, that were pointed out to me when I mentioned it to someone in real life. I don't remember what they were, but I remember thinking they were significant, but that it didn't overshadow the advantages.

Significant time of the day will no longer occur at the same time (midday, midnight).

People from other time zones will lose all reference to the significance of times where you are: eg "What are you doing calling me at 13:30 - it's the middle of the night here!" or "I had to get out of bed at 17:00 today (which may be before dawn)."

It looks like you've gotten 16 upvotes and only 1 downvote. I can't think of any other subreddit where this sort of joke could have any chance of this sort of success. Can't think of a word which fits? No worries, chuck a "fuck", "cunt" or "tits" in somewhere! She'll be right mate!

I resent having to do this just because of some stupid-arse "law" WTH? I have trouble getting up on time anyway, this makes it just traumatic. What kind of people have enough time to make a law to change the timezone. We should have realised then that it would come to this... the hippies did, but i guess they forgot.

Thats cool. Not sure how you going to the gym at 5:30 in daylight at a different location in Australia really affects me getting up for work in the dark though. Unless you have somehow found a way to share that sunlight with me?
P.s. Google tells me today that Sunrise was 5:08am in Brisbane, so if Bris had DLS someone in your situation would of been getting ready to go and heading to the gym in darkness. Another handy feature of living further south is twilight. Something we don't really get much/any of further north.

Yeah the great thing about Adelaide (And I suppose Perth, though I've never been) is that the city faces West and the sun sets over the ocean giving the most sun light possible. Also in Adelaide the sun rises over the hills, so its probably a half an hour later to hit the suburbs than it would be without the hills.

Also, I did used to get up in the dark to work in Melbourne, but I still loved DST for the evenings (I used to go to the gym after work and still be out in time for twilight). If that's where you are, then you are right about twilights!

Move the time zone to GMT+10:30 and get rid of DST. Its the concept of shifting biological clock that wrecks people. As someone that grew up in Perth, I find it extremely difficult to adjust to the +1hr difference. Also Perth is situated west of the time zone so we get a lot of daylight regardless.

Alternatively the government could create a DST provision, keep the time zone at GMT+10 but give employees the rights to start/finish an hour earlier (not perfect but doable). That way it will stagger traffic congestion and will be the best compromise for everyone but employers since population is divided 50/50 on the issue.

It's hard to give employees the right to adjust their hours. If a business provides any type of support to other businesses, they'll need to ensure they have sufficient staff on hand to cover the extended trading hours.

As someone that grew up in Perth, I find it extremely difficult to adjust to the +1hr difference

Did you know that there's actually a significant increase in suicides the day after the time change?

Alternatively the government could create a DST provision, keep the time zone at GMT+10 but give employees the rights to start/finish an hour earlier (not perfect but doable).

The best compromise I've ever seen, although personally I am fully against any DST or anything resembling it. The reason I personally disagree with this is that it would create confusion for customers of businesses: are they changing their hours or not? It would also probably have the same negative effect on people's mental health that DST does, except for a lesser proportion of the population.

I really like how it would stagger traffic congestion, though. It's certainly an interesting prospect.

I've not heard of any of those as being supposed advantages, though I have heard of the negative risks associated with DST (spikes in suicide and difficulty in interstate and international dealings). To me, those alone are reasons to get rid of it, although I'm also opposed to it aside from that.

If you truly believe the benefits of daylight saving outweigh the negatives, then argue that. Don't argue that the very real negatives don't matter.

People literally die because of this. Not only suicides, but heart attacks and accidents. Even for those not so obviously affected, people will have their circadian rhythms thrown off, usually resulting in less sleep.

This also ignores the inconveniences in dealing with different time zones, and the sheer absurdity of the whole thing.

You know, for an internet community I'm surprised I'm in the minority being a night owl. I for one, would rather have it light when I wake than have it light at 9:30pm. Throws my nights out of whack =/.

But I'll accept democracy on the matter, admittedly here in WA it means I get it my way anyway :P

everyone else in QLD would rather not be dripping in sweat with minor heat stroke waiting for the sun to go down at 9pm so the rooms in the house can finally cool down to a reasonable level by midnight.

Day light savings is 100% retarded .. so i'm not suprised east southerners love it so much.

This might surprise you, but the climate is cooler and days are shorter down south. So while DST might be retarded for QLD, this doesn't mean the whole idea of DST is retarded. You probably won't understand anyway being a queenslander.

I fucking lold so hard when I changed my plates and they asked me if I wanted Sunshine state of smart state. In Queensland DST wasn't that important because work started early anyway (7 am). In Perth its an absolute must, especially now I work at 8:00 and wake up at 5:00. Your just so tired when you get home otherwise.

The closer you are to the equator, the less your daylight hours are influenced by the seasons. For example, in Cairns the latest sunset time for this year is 6:57pm. The earlist sunset time this year is 5:50pm. So even with daylight savings the sun will always set before 8pm, often well before. The problem with daylight savings in terms of timing is that during the earlier months of the year you'd have the sun rising well after 7am in North QLD.

Saying "we are always open 9-5... but we arbitrarily change our clocks, you just have to know when" seems a bit strange to me. If you really need the daylight (which most businesses don't) just change your staffing hours?

I used to work in a job where we partnered with a southern help-desk. Everything was fine until DST kicked in, all of a sudden our users were left with no support for the last hour of the day. They had to train a WA helpdesk and pay overtime to the SA one in the process. Lots of money spent for something that was virtually the same the day before.

Even worse of a horror story: NT cable-TV guides were written in NSW time. You have any idea how many episodes of Dragon Ball Z I missed because of DST?

In the NT you won't really notice the difference. Day length doesn't change much between summer and winter the closer you get to the equator.

But in the southern states, summer means really long days where the sun comes up very early. Most people are more active in the evening than in the early morning, so much of that early sunlight is "wasted".

By shifting the clock forward an hour, everybody starts an hour earlier. So the sunlight hour which would have been wasted in the morning, is now "saved" to use in the evening instead. As a result, we get to sit around at 9pm with the sky still light enjoying some cool beverages.

It saves the daylight hours in your leisure time by taking them from the morning and shifting them to the evening, assuming you work 9-5 or even 8-6. The point is without daylight savings you typically sleep through one or two hours of daylight and remain awake for an extra one or two hours after dark. Due to the way daylight works up north the effect is far less dramatic than down south. So instead you wake up earlier (when it is still closer to dark), and when you have finished work you can hang around outside with the sun still up.

Given that like 90% of Australia's population lives down south, shouldn't the northern states be the ones who have to adapt to avoid the scenario you describe? I mean why should 10 million people in NSW and Victoria adjust everything for a few hundred thousand territorians?

Well I suppose it all comes down to personal preference, I prefer to work nights, i prefer to have my leisure time at night.

I can sleep all day, whilst the sun is up, (thick curtains and air-con) then wake up late afternoon 4PMish, have breakfast go shopping, do the shit i need to do while its still light, then sit in my patio from dusk to midnight having a BBQ, or playing computer games.

The heat, and especially the sun really does me over, i can't tolerate it very well. Working nights also makes it hard to adjust to being awake while the sun is up.

Maybe you should move north if you like the sun... cause i get an hour or two of sunlight after finished work even in winter. With daylight savings it'd be close to 4. I'd only just be cooling down enough to do things outside at bed time.

That's only a superficial saving though. Working 9-5, and then adjusting your clocks by 1 hour, is exactly the same as working 8-4.

It's currently very difficult to mentally compute the time in NSW from the NT. Often i'll call up a company out of hours and get a message "we are open 9-5 EST..."

To which I'll have to look up the conversion. It's not a simple matter of remembering X hours difference.

On the other hand, if their message said "we are open 8-4 EST..." And there was no DST offset, I could just work out the difference by adding the regular amount. I wouldn't need to worry about if they are in or out of DST, and much DST adds(or subtracts) the trading hours would contain all that info.

That's only a superficial saving though. Working 9-5, and then adjusting your clocks by 1 hour, is exactly the same as working 8-4.

A freedom which many people do not have...

To which I'll have to look up the conversion. It's not a simple matter of remembering X hours difference.

Hold on, on the one hand you are arguing that it's no different to simply shifting your works hours, but on the other hand you say its not as simple as simply shifting the hours when you have to figure it out in your head? Pick one or the other.

You are still arguing for a NT-centric view. Again I ask, why should 10 million odd Australians adjust their preferred behaviour for the benefit of a few hundred thousand territorians?

Telling a state: "you must all change your clocks on this day by a single hour, plus or minus" is harder than saying: "You can have different DST trading hours"?

Hold on, on the one hand you are arguing that it's no different to simply shifting your works hours, but on the other hand you say its not as simple as simply shifting the hours when you have to figure it out in your head? Pick one or the other.

You don't understand.

If I say: "there is 1/2 an hour difference between NT and NSW my trading hours are: 8-4 (DST) or 9-5 (non)"

A person in the NT can simply ask for their trading hours on a given day. Subtracting 1/2 an hour will always give you the NT time. (the NT person does not need to know when DST kicks in/out, because you'll implicitly get that info in their answer).

On the other hand, if they work 9-5 and always tell me they work 9-5, it's now my job to figure out what the offset is, 1.5 hours, or 1/2 an hour. The burden is on the person in the NT to know what part of DST NSW is in. Even if you ask them, they can respond "we are in DST". Well, what does "in" mean, +1 hour or -1 hour?

Again I ask, why should 10 million odd Australians adjust their preferred behaviour for the benefit of a few hundred thousand territorians?

Under the current system, the only options are: NT works in the dark, or are faced with difficult time-zone conversions. Neither are good.

If you did what I suggested:

The NT can advertise 9-5 trading hours, and 9-5 DST trading hours. NSW could advertise 9-5 trading hours, and 8-4 DST trading hours. The difference in Time Zone would be 1.5 all year round.

There would be no practical difference in NSW, except people wouldn't have to adjust their clocks on DST cutover. (let DST behaviour cut over, but keep clocks on the old time).

Just saying this over and over doesn't contribute to your argument. Most people don't have the luxury of changing their office hours and all businesses being open in their own arbitrary hours would be a massive hassle.

A government mandated time shift means once every six months everyone takes 30 seconds and jiggles their clocks and then everyone gets the chance to enjoy more daylight after work when it's most efficient.

Just saying this over and over doesn't contribute to your argument. Most people don't have the luxury of changing their office hours and all businesses being open in their own arbitrary hours would be a massive hassle.

If I (currently) measure NSW trading hours in GMT, then every company does adjust their trading hours twice yearly. If the government was to replace NSW's time zone with GMT, and keep everything else the same, that would achieve the goal (although things would be screwed up from GMT everywhere).

Now, if I replace the above GMT with GMT +8, you should hopefully realise they are identical. If not, so be it.

The whole point is to adjust for the hours of daylight which change quite significantly in the south from summer to winter. I think you're expecting everyone to suddenly get what you're saying and be grateful, the truth is I don't think you really understand it yourself.

The point is, as I say over and over again, 10 million Australians down south under daylight savings. How many in the territory? I was paying out on your underpopulated state :P

Yah. But it's like asking why the world's time zones are based on GMT. Time zones don't really follow demographics, and are largely based on history.

Or it's like asking why do we even have time zones at all? It's a totally arbitrary idea that noon needs to be the sun's highest point locally. Everyone could work in GMT and nothing would change, really.

Get every retailer and shop in the state to change their clocks, watches and software, as well as chaning schools clocks, watches and software, public transport clocks, watches and software, and television programming.

Just out of curiousity, have you lived a southern state before? There is a huge difference in the daylight hours available in winter and summer. Here in Adelaide, over winter it is daylight from about 7am-5pm. Over summer, with daylight savings, its 6am-9pm (roughly). If we didn't have daylight savings then our summer daylight would be from 5am-8pm. Most people aren't up at 5am so that hour of daylight would be 'wasted'.

So, just because you don't want to spend half a minute on google calculating time differences, the entire basis for daylight savings is pointless?
It makes less sense to change times of things, because that is more confusing; you wouldn't have continuity across the entire state as to which businesses or people have adjusted their business or operating hours. With DST, the entire state's time is shifted by one hour, in accordance with the change in daylight patterns. Easy, no fuss, everybody goes about living their lives normally, with a longer day to enjoy. It is honestly not the chore you're making it out to be to calculate interstate time differences. If you work in a business where that will be pertinent to you, then you will calculate the difference twice a year when the time changes and perform a basic subtraction operation when necessary.

You know what would make even less fuss, though? Not changing the times at all, and not altering the working hours.

Leave it as it is.

The day after daylight saving kicks into effect sees a significant increase in suicides. It makes any and all interactions between different time zones (either in other states/territories within Australia, and even worse internationally because the day where DST starts/stops isn't consistant) absolutely hell to organise, and there is no significant quantifiable advantage to it.

In the summer at more extreme latitudes the day is already really long: in Melbourne it can easily be light at 8:00 ignoring DST. When compared with less extreme latitudes where it goes down more consistently year-round at 6–7 why does it then make sense to add an extra hour on top of an already late sunset?

just because you don't want to spend half a minute on google calculating time differences

Sure, if you want to ignore the other things I mentioned. Like the massive re-structuring of interstate business twice-yearly.

the entire basis for daylight savings is pointless

I didn't say that. The point of daylight savings is to save daylight. It is just one method of doing so, however.

With DST, the entire state's time is shifted by one hour, in accordance with the change in daylight patterns. Easy, no fuss

This is easy because it's been in place for such a long time. People know it's coming and prepare. Preparation greatly simplifies the process.

If you work in a business where that will be pertinent to you, then you will calculate the difference twice a year when the time changes and perform a basic subtraction operation when necessary.

Except that the difference is controlled by other companies. You can't change their calculations.

Here is just one example:

I work in IT. We had a major server operation to do out-of-business hours. The best time was chosen to be early morning outside of weekdays. The window just happened to be in DST cutover. It was genuinely difficult to program around the deployment, because time on the machines.

Beyond having more time in the day?
That's the entire point of doing it...
Why would you want daylight hours to be wasted during what would be considered 'night'?
It gives people more opportunity to do things after work. Beyond walking the dog, not many people actually engage in anything meaningful prior to going to work. There are exceptions, obviously, but the majority of people (in NSW), enjoy having more leisure time. When the sun is out, there isn't much that you can't do if it's there, apart from astronomy. So, it makes sense to allow for those daylight hours to be utilised, instead of sleeping through them. You 'save' the daylight.

I live in Perth. I was livid when we turned down daylight savings. But this year, I've been loving the morning light for my bike ride. It was so good to get up in the morning light. I would have hated to lose that hour in the morning.

And my son has to go to RCH on Monday to see his specialist. Gives us an hour extra of fucking around in the morning, but them I'm home ultra-late for my girls.

And it doesn't matter how many times I have to do it, I occasionally fuck up or even forget the conversion. One time I took the kids to MovieWorld and the carpark was empty because I'd forgotten about the lack of DST in Qld.

the Newman government has decided that rather than imposing a carbon tax or anything similar, it can do better. Instead, they're going to take action and halt climate change by preventing that extra hour of daylight you'd get from daylight savings.

Timezones determined by state borders is a ridiculous notion given how wide some of the states in this country are, the feds should step in and mandate time zones according to longitude and latitude, not state borders. The ridiculousness of the NSW/QLD border just shows how out of touch this old system is. Consistent time zones, that don't change according to season, but are appropriate for the locality are what is needed.

None of that is convincing. Your average 9-5 worker can get more done before work when they're still fresh instead of stuffed. Sun glare is always going to affect one set of workers. And waking up while it's still dark is depressing.

The music industry cops big losses from daylight savings, as people don't tend to go watch bands when the sun is still up.

From what I can gather, cool guys (myself) enjoy DST because we can party and get out bronze on later into the evening. Nerds (you guys) don't enjoy this because the sun puts too much glare on your computer monitors.